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Advertisement: The pop-upadvertisement on the Stuff news site, http://www.stuff.co.nz, showed a woman in her underwear holding her stomach with the tagline "1 rule for a flat stomach. Remove 1 Kg each day with this old and weird rule. Read the article..."

The Chair ruled the complaint was Settled.

Complainant, C Bovey, said: This is an animated video of a near-naked woman in her underwear, shaking her stomach up and down. I find it offensive, and particularly inappropriate while I am trying to read serious news content. It is incredibly insensitive for this ad to appear in a story about some poor man who has just lost his life. This ad has been appearing on Stuff in any article I read for days now and there doesn't seem to be any way to stop it. I don't want to see half-naked closeups of people's body in the news. Media response from Fairfax said: "...Unfortunately the ad did slip through our quality control processes, however as soon as we saw the ad on site we blocked it from appearing. The ad had come through our programmatic channels, so was not an ad we had directly booked and run on site as we would have been able to stop it at the booking process.

We had implemented the block prior to receiving this complaint through the ASA..." The relevant provisions were Code of Ethics - Basic Principle 4, Rule 4, Rule 5.

The Chair noted the Complainant's concern the advertisement was insensitive and inappropriately placed within a serious news story.

The Chair acknowledged the Media's response confirming the advertisement had been removed.

Given the Media's co-operative engagement with the process and the self-regulatory action taken in removing the advertisement, the Chair said that it would serve no further purpose to place the matter before the Complaints Board. The Chair ruled that the matter was settled.

Chair's Ruling: Complaint Settled

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